Last week at the 2011 CRN Xchange event in Orlando, the results of the 21st Channel Champions awards were announced. IBM Software was honored with a Gold Award in 2 categories, including Backup and Recovery Software for the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager family. The winners will be featured in the April issue of CRN - both in print and online.

Everything Channel's Channel Champion survey helps solution providers select from the myriad vendors out there, the cream of the crop. The Channel Champs program measures the satisfaction of solution providers that currently sell a particular vendor's products and/or services--regardless of whether or not they are formally in a manufacturer's channel program. It is the largest business partner satisfaction study conducted.

Five categories relevant to IBM Software were in the 2011 Channel Champions Survey: Data and Information Management , Middleware, Business Intelligence, Collaboration, and Backup and Recovery software.

The survey results were dominated by IBM and Microsoft.

In 2011 we came out as clear winners by sweeping the Middleware and the Backup and Recovery categories. Most notable is the Backup and Recovery 'win' for Tivoli, where IBM gained a clean sweep victory. It is worth noting that in 2009 Tivoli was a distant third in this category, confirming that a great deal of progress has been made in both product capabilities and channel programs.

IBM placed second in the other 3 categories, losing by a narrow margin to Microsoft in Data and Information Management and by wider margins in Business Intelligence and Collaboration.

Congratulations to the IBM Channels Sales and Marketing Teams for achieving this great honor, and THANK YOU to our fantastic Business Partners for all you do to support our solutions and our mutual customers.

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